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They’re made out of weights

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Re: They’re made out of weights

#391

Post by yencabulator »

drdaeman wrote: post #130
dsign wrote: post #118

Oh, this was a fun read and one that kids should have in school before they turn ten. Because we are not taking things seriously. If ClosedAI or DeepDisTrust or Posthropic come up with something that quacks like a sentient being, our built-in innate reaction is going to be to scorn it, dismiss it and end the conversation. The alternative, to even consider that we fungible creatures who live in apple-eating-sin that g…

> alien souls Do those actually qualify as alien, if they're products of our human culture and just the substrate is different? > We would have to stop believing that the nature of disease and death is more divine than ourselves. Why? Stopping believing in mutually contradictory claims is not a requirement. Especially when it comes to concepts that don't seem to have a definition, like "divine".

> Do those actually qualify as alien, if they're products of our human culture and just the substrate is different?

I'll posit "alien" is a spectrum.

For the sake of the argument, let's assume that some form of panspermia is real and the same tree of life has reached Earth, Enceladus (moon of Saturn) and TRAPPIST-1 (a different solar system in our galaxy). Let's also say there was a second abiogenesis event somewhere in Messier 104 (another galaxy).

Earth to Enceladus would arguably be already "alien", but there might be similarities, maybe there was something there that looked like one of our Archaea, while sharing none of our Eukarya and having its own domains of life.

Earth to TRAPPIST-1 would be distinctly alien, evolved so differently it'd be almost unrecognizable, but they'd likely still be carbon-based lifeforms sharing the same basic building blocks. Maybe something like lipids forming cell walls would also be seen there, but they'd likely be independently evolved.

Earth to M104, any similarity would be at best convergent evolution. Truly unarguably alien.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180423171909/https://cosmosmag...

Re: They’re made out of weights

#392

Post by phkahler »

f_klem wrote: post #161

After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and Lakoff mainly), I strongly tend to disagree with any theory about emergent consciousness in modern or future AI systems, any theory proposing a similarity between AI systems and the human brain/mind, or any theory about the computational mind. What all these the…

>> and that is that we understand (or we think we understand) how our brain/mind works. But the truth is that we don't know. And there's even not a single clue that we actually know too much, and not a clue that our brain/mind and cells work 'as the machines we build'.

>> I highly recommend people in the AI research space should read philosophy and modern linguistics.

I highly recommend the philosophers read some neuroscience. The whole "model weights" thing in AI is modeled after the synaptic connections and between actual neurons. There is already quite a bit known about how the brain works at a low level. There is also a lot that is still unknown. There are also differences between discrete neuron firing and weights as signals, but there is enough similarity to make artificial neural nets useful and do things similar to what real one do.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#393

Post by frig57 »

derektank wrote: post #360
f_klem wrote: post #161

After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and Lakoff mainly), I strongly tend to disagree with any theory about emergent consciousness in modern or future AI systems, any theory proposing a similarity between AI systems and the human brain/mind, or any theory about the computational mind. What all these the…

>Is the same underlying assumptions that treats cells as machines, our body as a complex machine. These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things Do you disagree with the assumption that cells are machines? They seem pretty machine-like to me. I certainly don’t think individual cells have any subjective experience or sense of agency. I would b…

It's not a huge leap to imagine biological cells might have a rudimentary consciousness

Pan-psychists might argue that your subjective consciousness is an aggregate of all the cells/molecules, etc in the system

"While each biological cell operates largely on its own chemical cues, they all coordinate through complex nervous and chemical networks to create your unified, subjective experience."

You might be a rigid materialist

Re: They’re made out of weights

#395

Post by cootsnuck »

dnautics wrote: post #365
kristov wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. An LLM is not a human brain, and does not try to emulate one. It should not be a surprise that an LLM does not behave like a human brain. So we can not infer things either way. The best we can say is that an LLM appears to exhibit very similar behavior to a human brain, under certain constraints. So maybe we can infer that the human brain has something in i…

> An LLM is not a human brain, true > and does not try to emulate one citation please. something like the universal approximation theory comes to mind, transformer architecture clearly has the shape of a universal algorithm approximator

> something like the universal approximation theory comes to mind, transformer architecture clearly has the shape of a universal algorithm approximator

That says nothing about emulating a human brain.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#396

Post by jimbokun »

codeflo wrote: post #259
f_klem wrote: post #161

After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and Lakoff mainly), I strongly tend to disagree with any theory about emergent consciousness in modern or future AI systems, any theory proposing a similarity between AI systems and the human brain/mind, or any theory about the computational mind. What all these the…

> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things. On the contrary, it's precisely this assumption, that there is a "subjective experience" that requires explanation beyond the material, that is axiomatically assumed without evidence. It falls apart quickly, any "subjective experience" is completely tied to neurons, knock out the neurons and t…

It’s the opposite.

Descartes made clear that subjective experience is the ONLY thing we know. Everything else is theories to explain the phenomena we subjectively experience.

We theorize that there is a physical world and other beings like us having similar subjective experiences, because that seems the best explanation for our subjective experiences. But we might be living in the Matrix, with all the people we think we are interacting with and just sophisticated simulations.

Re: They’re made out of weights

#398

Post by aspenmartin »

SlinkyOnStairs wrote: post #313
codeflo wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things. On the contrary, it's precisely this assumption, that there is a "subjective experience" that requires explanation beyond the material, that is axiomatically assumed without evidence. It falls apart quickly, any "subjective experience" is completely tied to neurons, knock out the neurons and t…

There's two meanings to "the body is a complex machine" and I think you're missing the forest for the trees here. 1) The abstract "dictionary" version: It'd be technically correct to say that the body is a machine under the definition of "A machine is a thermodynamic system that uses power to apply forces and control movement to perform an action.". 2) But there's also the less abstract/technical: "The body is alike…

> With regard to AI, there's a lot of people extrapolating "There is no magical animating spirit, the brain is just a pile of stochastic molecules following the laws of physics" into "The brain is an inert pile of matter, computers are an inert pile of matter, ergo AI/LLMs are like the brain!"

Why do you need a specific organization of molecules for a phenomenon similar to consciousness to arise? Does anyone seriously consider a brain to be something other than “a pile of molecules following the laws of physics”? If so that’s not science or philosophy, that’s religion. You have a virtually complete phenomenological model of the universe for all intents and purposes and yet somehow the onus is on the person being like “hey no laws of physics are being broken ==> the brain is simply following the laws of physics”

How is it possible that people think of subjective experience and get rabbit holed into some mystical world where subjective experience is this special exception to everything else that is simply an emergent property of complex physical systems? “AI/LLMs are just like the brain” is a strawman, why does this claim need to be true for LLMs or any artificial system to be considered to have something akin to the thing you think of as consciousness? It’s more: consciousness is not some mystical or religious thing outside of the realm of physics, it’s an emergent property of a complex system. AI is a relatively complex system. We don’t really know or understand the relationship between the raw physics and again what we consider consciousness, so it’s simply a statement of “we can’t refute that these systems exhibit something similar” because we don’t know enough to refute that

Re: They’re made out of weights

#399

Post by cootsnuck »

derektank wrote: post #360
f_klem wrote: post #161

After reading Being and Time from Martin Heidegger, What Computers can't still do by Hubert Dreyfus, and some authors in cognitive linguistics (Langacker and Lakoff mainly), I strongly tend to disagree with any theory about emergent consciousness in modern or future AI systems, any theory proposing a similarity between AI systems and the human brain/mind, or any theory about the computational mind. What all these the…

>Is the same underlying assumptions that treats cells as machines, our body as a complex machine. These theories are flawed in the sense that they cannot account for subjective experience and agency, amongst other things Do you disagree with the assumption that cells are machines? They seem pretty machine-like to me. I certainly don’t think individual cells have any subjective experience or sense of agency. I would b…

> I certainly don’t think individual cells have any subjective experience or sense of agency.

There's definitely research and scholarship that would beg to disagree with you there. At least in terms of completely writing off the notion of "agency" when it comes to cells.

Dr. Michael Levin's lab is doing some pretty cool work. https://drmichaellevin.org/

Re: They’re made out of weights

#400

Post by dnautics »

anthonyrstevens wrote: post #377
dnautics wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we know the brain does not use gradient descent. (i agree it doesn't matter)

How do we know this?

i recall a hinton lecture where he talks about the mechanism of memory formation in the brain and it's not fully sussed out but it's also not backprop, its some sort of forward prediction and immediate reinforcement loop.

There's also no plausible biological/chemical mechanism to backpropagate.

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